Since it’s already come up on Twitter, we want to take a minute to address Sunday’s announcement that writer Greg Rucka will be leaving Cyclops after issue five.
If you’ve been following this podcast–or Rachel elsewhere–for any length of time, you know that we love Greg, we love Cyclops, and we love Greg’s work on the Cyclops ongoing. We are of course sorry to see him leave–but we absolutely support his decision.
More, we are so glad to have seen one of our favorite writers (and human beings) set the tone and bar for a title that’s come to mean a lot to both of us. We’re looking forward to reading the remaining three issues of his run–and we fervently hope oncoming writer John Layman will continue in the same spirit.
We also want to take this opportunity to address something that’s likely to come up again as we delve into more series and creators come and go:
As far as we are concerned, it is never, ever cool to hassle or guilt-trip a creator for leaving a company-owned book, and–assuming they’ve not been disclosed publicly–their reasons for doing so are nobody else’s business.
Some of the discretion we choose to exercise here is a matter of professional courtesy or necessity–we’re both comics-industry professionals, and one of us is an employee at a publisher. Mostly, though, it’s a matter of basic human decency. Comics creators are people, and it’s important to us to respect their personal/professional boundaries, just as we want and expect others to respect ours. Gossip and speculation about other people’s intentions are really, really not welcome here.
Greg is a friend, so in this case it’s a little more personal than usual–but as far as we’re concerned, that’s a hard line, one we’ll be both observing in the podcast and enforcing in the comments.
TL;DR – If you want to complain about Greg Rucka leaving Cyclops or speculate about his reasons for doing so, you need to take that shit elsewhere.